A sweet reveal: Boy or girl?

And I was concerned about the expectations that people (including ourselves) might place on the baby as soon as they found out whether it was a boy or a girl.

But who was I kidding? I’m a planner! Plus, I didn’t want a closet full of only yellow and green clothes, which for some reason seem to be the only acceptable neutral colors for babies.

None of that seemed important, though, after our first-trimester screening came back with some potentially alarming results. We had to do a follow-up DNA test — and wait several days for results — to make sure the baby was OK.

That test also would reveal the sex of the baby, about six weeks earlier than soon-to-be parents generally find out.

So — 11 very long days later, when I finally got the phone call with the test results — all I cared about was whether the baby was healthy. I was overjoyed when the doctor told me everything was OK, and I didn’t object when she asked whether I was sure I wanted to know the sex.

I immediately called Kenley (I was on the way to a girls beach trip in Charleston, S.C., while he was in the recording studio in Columbia) and told him the baby was OK. I asked him whether he wanted to know — son or daughter? — and I was a bit surprised when he asked me to hold off.

When he joined me in Charleston a couple of days later, Kenley still wasn’t sure he wanted to know the sex. I started to get worried. I knew I couldn’t keep that big of a secret for six months!

For the next several weeks, I had to be careful of my pronouns. I slipped a few times, but I also threw in purposeful decoys to throw him off the trail.

I finally convinced Kenley that he wanted — needed — to know, and I planned to reveal the gender to him on Father’s Day. I took pictures of the moment so we could relive the surprise. Scroll down and read the captions below:

First, I picked up a special order of cupcakes from Sprinkles.

These sweet baby-themed treats had a surprise inside.

Kenley took a bite of a cupcake to reveal the color of the filling: pink for a girl, blue for a boy.

Blue!

Our little cupcake is a boy!

Turns out, I didn’t have to worry about spoiling the surprise; Kenley says he thought it was a girl the whole time.

Kenley is the first of three boys and thought the odds were aligned for a daughter.

7 thoughts on “A sweet reveal: Boy or girl?”

You know how excited we already are! At least now that the word is out, we won’t have to be so careful about what pronoun we use when referring to our grandchild! We are now thinking blue and all things boyish!